The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist

by Robert R. Reilly

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

240, May

Hardcover, 26.95

ISBN: 1933859911

A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the Ashbrook Center.

People are shocked and frightened by the behavior coming out the Islamic world—not only because it is violent, but also because it is seemingly inexplicable. While there are many answers to the question of “what went wrong” in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. Until now.

In this eye-opening new book, foreign policy expert Robert R. Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture.

Terrorism—from 9/11, to London, Madrid, and Mumbai, to the Christmas 2009 attempted airline bombing—is the most obvious manifestation of this crisis. But Reilly shows that the pathology extends much further. The Closing of the Muslim Mind solves such puzzles as:

why peace is so elusive in the Middle East

why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development

why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world

why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years

why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon